


Left it in Chicago

by EdgarAllenPoet



Category: Original Work
Genre: BDSM, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Martial Arts, Mental Instability, Other, Self-Destruction, professional Dominant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 19:30:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12824475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdgarAllenPoet/pseuds/EdgarAllenPoet
Summary: As the quote says, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, said Freud only about Freud.”  Sometimes a spatula is just a spatula.  A bit of disinfecting and dissociating, and it’s easy to forget that it used to be your favorite spanking tool.





	Left it in Chicago

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking about how to put together a sparring machine, and it turned angsty. I don't know who this character is, but I like her. Probably won't be any more of this.

After my husband died, I kind of fell out of the scene.  The corsets and leather cuffs were retired to the highest shelf of my closet, out of sight out of mind.  I no longer checked my fetlife profile the way I did for the first few months, when I’d made some low-fat attempt of staying in the community, being active online without having the energy to be active outside.  I no longer checked my fetlife profile, but my email still dinged every few days with a new message.  Someone trying to get a hold of me.  “We miss you!” “Where have you been?” “Hey T, just heard the news.  I’m so sorry for your loss.” 

 

I put the messages to use.  Every time I got an email, I had to unpack a box. Within two weeks of starting the message system, three months after moving back into my parent’s place, everything was unpacked.  Everything but that box in the back of my closet. 

 

The stuff that wasn’t in the box- which contained things either too emotionally painful to deal with, or too incriminating to get away with- was repurposed.  A bull whip turned into a cat toy.  A hairbrush is just a hair brush. That wax melting pot now melts scented wax instead of wax of a very specific color that’ll look just  _ perfect _ with someone’s skin tone. 

 

My vibrator remained a vibrator, but the box of condoms that accompanied it was now tucked away in the deepest bathroom drawer, probably going to expire and go dry before they ever saw the light of day.

 

My spanking bench now housed laundry, a house plant, and a cat bed.  I used my favorite riding crop as a fly/spider/icky things swatter.  I donated all of my stilettos to Goodwill. I only ever wore them for him, and with him  _ gone _ , I wasn’t going to wear them for myself. 

 

There’s something strange about being a widow at twenty-seven, just like there was something strange about being a professional dominatrix at twenty-six.  There’s something strange about having an eighty year old father with dementia, but sad as that by itself is, it really helped hide the lifestyle.  Now it helps hide the remnants of that lifestyle, an entire piece of who I am that he’ll never know anything about.  Even if telling him wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard, he wouldn’t remember an hour afterwards anyways. 

 

Like I said, convenient.

 

The house my father and I occupy is a split tri-level.  The basement is an actual basement, with windows just peaking out of the dirt and a staircase rising out of a pit in the backyard.  The ground-level/garage is both ground level and half-buried under a hill.  The second story is at actual ground level, with the front door opening up to the backyard.  That’s the floor Dad lives on.  He can’t handle stairs so well anymore, not with his bad ankles from high school basketball, his bad knee from the service, his bad hip from his fall two years ago. 

 

Two years ago was the last time I’d seen him before moving back home.  He forgave me.  These days, I don’t think he remembers me shutting out our family. 

 

Before his fall, I hadn’t seen him for five years.  I was a sophomore in college when we fell out of touch with each other.  They didn’t help pay for college; I didn’t have the money to get myself home.  Before I knew it, two Christmases passed, the phone line went dead.  I graduated and didn’t give them the date; they didn’t even try to show up.  I don’t blame them.

 

At that point, I was so deep in with Andrew and the scene and my new lifestyle in Chicago that I barely gave the folks back in Youngstown a second thought. 

 

You might be thinking, “Where the hell is Youngstown?”  Exactly.  Exactly my point. 

 

But with Dad never coming downstairs, I’m pretty much free to do whatever I want.  With no friends and no visitors, my space can be whatever I want.  A melting pot can be a melting pot.  A riding crop can be a fly swatter.  My dad doesn’t even know I have a cat, but even if he did, a bullwhip could remain a bullwhip, and nobody would be the wiser.  I could honest to God host clients, or even just  _ partners _ , in the basement, and nobody would have to find out.  The walls are thick, and my dad’s hearing has gone to shit. The closest neighbor is three-quarters of a mile away.  My playthings could scream and scream and nobody would hear them. 

 

But that’s not who I am anymore.  My Chicago friends don’t know I’m back in Ohio, and even if they did, they wouldn’t make the ten hour drive to visit.  I haven’t bothered making friends back home, nothing beyond the ‘we used to go to highschool together’ familiarity that comes from living in a small city like Youngstown. 

I didn’t forge new relationships in Youngstown.  I didn’t repurpose my old friends into Adult Friends.  I did repurpose my stuff, though.  Too sentimental and lazy to sell it, too decent to donate it to Goodwill and terrorize the employees, too distant to give it to friends back in the city.  So I repurposed it, because as the quote says, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, said Freud only about Freud.”  Sometimes a spatula is just a spatula.  A bit of disinfecting and dissociating, and it’s easy to forget that it used to be your favorite spanking tool. 

 

My proudest innovation lives in the garage- a spanking machine setup next to a punching bag.  While my old friends may have given up on contacting me and forgotten I was ever in the scene to begin with- while my old friends probably stopped noticing my absence, the people at my gym have definitely seen the consequences of my leaving the lifestyle. 

 

Once a sadist, always a sadist.  I’ve got to take it out on something.

 

I’ve never been a terribly graceful sparrer.  I started with taekwondo in elementary school, moved to kickboxing in seventh grade, and after years and years of fighting you’d think I’d be better at it.  There’s always people in the gyms who are so naturally talented, so obviously gifted, and they move through sparring sessions like they were born to do it.  Every sparring session I do is a fight not only with my opponent but with myself.  Nothing has ever been easy.  No amount of experience helps me make up for missing talent. 

 

But damn, it feels good to hit things. 

 

The punching bag hangs from the ceiling and is tucked into the corner, with enough room to swing but not enough to get erratic about it. A small segment of cement wall, just two feet protruding into the room, creates a protective barrier between the punching back and the spanking machine I set up next to it.

 

When I was in college I made friends with someone in the engineering department, and enough bribing and batting my eyelashes got him to build something for me.  The spanking machine was a simple design- a box, a power chord, a swinging arm.  It had three speed settings: slow, fast, and random. 

 

On those nights when my self-loathing bubbles to the surface in energy that has the potential to be suicidal if I don’t keep tabs on it, I take to the garage.  I wrap my knuckles and turn the machine on random.  There’s a boxing glove secured to the arm of it now, but padding or no padding, the thing packs a wallop.  Jab, cross, duck and weave.  Punch, elbow, duck, upper cut. 

 

Andy had hated that thing in the way you hate tequila.  You hate how it tastes, hate who it turns you into, but  _ God _ , you love how it feels. 

 

I tried it on myself, of course, more than once.  I’d never do something to a bottom that I hadn’t had done to me.  You have to know what you’re working with, know what those screams and moans really translate to.  You have to know when stop might actually mean  _ stop _ , safeword or no. 

 

In a way, sparring sessions are more dangerous than BDSM scenes.  In a scene you know your partner ahead of time, you know each other’s level of play and agree to it.  You hard limit some things, lay down what you both want, and there’s always a safeguard to stop it.

 

A sparring session could be with anyone.  UFC, Taekwondo, Karate, or the style that annoying kid with all the trips and grabs and chokes.  You go in, one minute to fight, thirty seconds to breathe, and another minute to redeem yourself. 

 

You either finish your session or you get too hurt to continue. No safeword, no safeguards, no real reason to trust your partner.  If everyone’s there to work out their aggression, there’s no reason to believe they’ll hold back. 

 

Which is why I train.  I beat the punching bag to a pulp and split open my knuckles, relishing in the sting and the blood.  I block and dodge the glove flying at my head and take a few pops when I’m not paying attention.  I pretend it’s a person, pretend it’s a real fight.  I zone out.  I get into it.  It’s almost like masturbating. 

But the distractions can only last for so long.  Eventually I have to give up for the night.  I turn off the machine and wipe the blood from my hands, disinfecting the bag with the same care and routine that I used to wipe down gear after scenes with clients.  I don’t treat myself to any form of after care, just wash my hands and roll my neck and peel the sweat soaked sports bra off my body. 

 

There’s a lone beer living in my fridge, and I crack it open as I throw myself onto my computer chair like a dead fish.  Like a rag doll.  Yeah, that’s the phrase people use for that. 

 

I stayed very far away from alcohol for the first few months after Andy’s death.  No booze, no drugs- nothing more potent than caffeine.  I wouldn’t even touch Tylenol- not with a twelve foot pole.  I handled my father’s medication for him and nothing else, knowing that with my mental state and emotional instability, any sort of substance was just a step too close to a suicide attempt. 

 

But months have gone and passed, and while I’m still not better, I’m a bit farther from the edge.  None of my family were alcoholics, so I figure I’m safer than some.  No predispositions, or whatever.  No depression of alcoholism or any sort of mental problem.  Nothing beyond dementia, and at this rate, I’d willingly volunteer for a chance to forget some things. 

 

My computer is the ancient box type from 1997, the kind that whirls and grinds when it wakes up.  The first thing I’d changed when I moved back home was getting rid of the dial-up internet.  It had taken a good deal of finagling to get this dinosaur of a machine to hook up to high speed internet (or, as high speed as it got, in Youngstown, Ohio), but now that I’ve got it hooked up, I feel inclined to actually use it.

 

Besides, I’ve lost my laptop charger, and finding it would require the kind of tidying I don’t have the energy to attempt at the moment. 

 

I boot up the old computer and take a gulp of my beer.  It’s not quite cold enough.  I have to take another look at the fridge.  When an appliance is as old as you are, you have to make sure it doesn’t take a shit and poison all of your food.  Of all the things in my life, I trust that fridge the least. 

 

After the whirring and the crackling calms down, I pop a Buffy DVD into the disc drive and pull up my email.  I don’t bother with Facebook (deactivated) or Fetlife (a ghost town). This computer is too slow to even try and bother with Netflix or Youtube.  Just me and Buffy and MS Paint tonight, friends.  Buffy, MS Paint, and a notification pinging in my inbox.

 

The email reads, “New PM from DarkxDark,” and maybe it’s the endorphins that accompany the blood oozing from my busted hands.  Maybe it’s the beer bumbling happily through my veins.  Maybe I’ve just finally cracked. 

 

Whatever the motivation, I click “read more” and wait the several minutes while my computer figures out how to open a new window.  Fetlife loads, the familiar black screen and horrible screen names, and while I sit there watching the computer work away at it, I muse at how easy it is to turn back into Ohio. 

 

Here I sit, with baggy jeans and a beer in my hand, bare feet and tits out, not a care in the world for my stomach folds or my unwashed hair.  This isn’t the T I left behind in Chicago.  This is the T I left behind when I moved away for college.  Older and sadder, but still the same.  Barefoot, beer in hand, pretty damn bad at taking care of herself. 

 

The message is ordinary, business as usual. 

 

“Good evening Mistress,” it starts.  “I’m a sissy boy looking to serve you.  I want you to grind my dick into the floor with your heels, and I want to say thank you.  Punish me.  Use me.  I’m yours.” 

 

To an outsider, this kind of message would be surprising at least.  For a veteran in the scene, it was business as normal.  I never played with men like this, back in the day.  If you couldn’t approach me and act like a functional human, I couldn’t trust you enough to waste my time.  

 

But there was something compelling about this message that matched so many other disgusting, pathetic messages.  

 

_ Punish me. _  I lick the blood where it’s pooling in my cheek from a swing I’d failed to dodge properly.  I don’t wear a mouth guard, even though I really ought to.  I can’t tell you why.  

 

_ Use me _ . I wipe the blood off my knuckles onto my dirty jeans and revel at the sharp sting of denim scraping broken skin.  I look at the floor, where my cat lays on its side and swats lazily at the unraveling end of the bullwhip-cat-toy-substitute.

 

Sometimes a cat toy is just a cat toy.  Sometimes bloody knuckles are just bloody knuckles. Why does everything have to feel like a God damned metaphor.

 

_ I’m yours _ .  I’ve been hiding for months now.  Hiding physically in the basement, hiding emotionally at the funeral, hiding socially from everyone I left behind in Chicago.  I hide my past from my father, my present from my friends, and my future from myself, not even daring to give it a second thought.

 

But hide as I might, it’s always there, tickling the back of my mind.  After my husband died, I didn’t fall out of the scene.  I ran away from it.  I didn’t know how to be a dominant without him as my submissive.  Air of confidence and cocky attitude aside, I didn’t know how to be without him.  They say the sub holds the real power in the scene, and they’re right.  In the scene, both personal and public, I’d never had a power or presence without him. 

 

But run as I might, I haven’t actually escaped the lifestyle.  I’ve repurposed all my gear, I’ve hidden all my outfits, and I’ve abandoned all my friends.  In reality, I traded leather paddles and bruised wrists for sparring helmets and bloody teeth.  I left Chicago, I left the scene, but a lifestyle is more than what you wear and who you talk to. 

 

I stare at the message on my screen and come to realize something.  It’s very much a cliche, that you can take the girl out of the scene, but you can’t take the scene out of the girl.  All these months and I thought I was putting it behind me, but ten hours aside, there’s no real distance between Ohio and Chicago. 

 

Because lifestyle or not, job or pleasure, married or widow.  Be it of sound mind or self-destruction, I have to hurt someone.  It’s in my blood.  It’s who I am.  In being a sadist, I’ve turned myself into a masochist.

 

_ I’m yours _ , he says to me, and I say it to the lifestyle, because apparently there’s no escaping it.  I click into the message field and start to type. 

 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

 

Sometimes a sadist is just a sadist.

‘Hey there, baby,’ I type back, and hate myself less than I’m expecting to. 


End file.
